Maps and comics share a creative genome: They're both made for sharing information with illustrations. When combined, they are irresistible to fans who want to explore their favorite fictional worlds. "I think that readers of comic books---like readers of novels or watchers of films---want to believe in the story they’re reading," said John Hilgart, proprietor of the blog Comic Book Cartography. Maps, he says, make comic mythology more real. "There’s a hunger to know where Gotham City is located, or what’s on the 6th floor of the Fantastic Four headquarters."
The blog started as a joke with author Jonathan Lethem over email. From 2010 to 2013, he meticulously curated his childhood comic book collection, posting over 140 maps, diagrams, and charts. The archive is a tour of fantasy worlds both iconic and obscure: from Thor's Asgard to the mutated geography of Kamandi.
With a few exceptions, Comic Book Cartography spans the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the so-called Silver Age of comics. Superhero comics were reinvented in this era. Characters became more complex, and expansive story arcs replaced serialized adventures as the norm.
But the industry still didn't take itself too seriously, says Hilgart. Things were less canonized compared to today's titles, and writers and artists in those days could take creative liberty when they put a map in a comic. "I guess once you say that it’s exactly one way, then there’s nothing left to discover about theses places," he said. For example, he says, the Bat Cave seemed to get rearranged and grow new rooms and tunnels every time it was mapped.
Hilgart is an admitted comic art fanboy: His other blog, called Four Color Process, is dedicated to the hued dots that illustrators used to add color and texture to color comics before digital tools took over. For Comic Book Cartography, he was originally going to use maps he found on the internet, but he ended up spending hours digitizing his own collection because he wasn't satisfied with the resolution of most web images. "It's an obsessive thing to scan the Baxter building just so you can zoom in to incredible levels," Hilgart said.
